Premier FX liquidators receive claims from 121 creditors with claim value of £6.76m

More than a year after the Joint Administrators moved Premier FX into creditors’ voluntary liquidation, Menzies LLP – the Joint Liquidators in this matter, have published a progress report for the first year of the liquidation of Premier FX.

At the date of their appointment, the liquidators of Menzies LLP took steps to review the assets and company information, including the 73 bank accounts operated by Premier FX. During the company’s last six years of trading, about 300,000 banking transactions were carried out across these accounts.

A total of GBP 556,401 was transferred from the administration to the liquidation.

In addition, a sum of 90 million Philippine pesos is held on an account at Barclays. These funds represent monies held in the currency denomination as at the date of the administration order. These funds have yet to be converted to GBP.

As at the date of the administration, Premier FX held funds of about GBP 1.8 million, against which there were claims of up to GBP 10.6 million.

During the administration, unsecured claims were estimated at GBP 10.6 million. To date, the liquidators have received claims from 121 creditors with a claim value of GBP 6.76 million. These claims have not been admitted for dividend purposes at this stage. The prospect of a dividend to creditors is heavily dependent on the outcome of ongoing investigations.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) continues its investigations into the demise of Premier FX, the liquidators confirm. In its latest update on this case (from the summer of 2019), the FCA stated that Premier FX was not permitted to carry on a business of accepting deposits and, if it turns out this is what it was doing, it was doing so illegally, without the proper authorisation.

Accepting deposits without authorisation is a criminal offence under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and also means that consumers are denied appropriate protections. These include the detailed vetting and scrutiny that would have been carried out by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the FCA, proper capitalisation sufficient for deposit-taking, supervision as a deposit-taker and deposit protection under the FSCS in the event of failure. All of these protections are missing when a firm carries out a deposit taking business without permission.

The FCA said back then that it was reviewing Premier FX’s bank accounts and tracing the funds in question as a matter of priority.